Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, July 8, 2012

Making Peace – Israel’s way or the US way?

The
US
refers to those nations with whom they have a strategic interest in
accommodating, as ‘our friends,’ and with that designation those friends receive
military and financial aid. It does not
help to change fundamental attitudes to war and peace and it only works for as
long as it is in the interest of the recipient nation to let it work. Like George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth,
propaganda and historical revisionism are tools used by nations to mould the
national mood, dictate behaviours and manipulate the past to create the future.

The
basic requirements for making Peace with Israel were never fulfilled either
by Anwar Sadat or his successor Hosni Mubarak. The fundamental requirement for
peaceful co-existence, the humanisation of the enemy, was never permitted to take
root in Egyptian soil.

We
may never know how or even if Anwar El-Sadat would have nurtured the
Israeli-Egyptian peace had he lived but we do know that he was conflicted by
virtue of his faith. According to Salim Mansur “Sadat, the Quran, and Jews in
the Holy Land” (Centre for Security Policy
Jan. 22, 2007) Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem
was a spiritual acceptance of the Jews right to their homeland and it was a
repudiation of the Philo-Nazi ideology of the Brotherhood. He was however unable to reconcile his
journey with his Koranic learning which ridiculed Jewish faith and
delegitimized its followers humanity.

Israel’s problem is that Egypt, being the most populous and powerful of
the Arab nations never intended to fully honour its commitments under the peace
accord it signed in Washington in 1979, either
to Israel or to the United States.
It prevented its citizens from visiting Israel. It encouraged its racist
press to incite against Israelis as Jews, and by focusing popular discontent
against Israel
as a religious obligation, denied Israelis the same right to self-determination
that it demanded and continues to demand for the Palestinians. In effect it dismissed
the Peace Treaty it signed with Israel
as no more than a piece of paper. It
blocked cultural exchanges and ensured minimal interaction between Israelis and
Egyptians as undesirable.

Hosni Mubarak famously stated that “….We [Egypt] have outwitted them, and
what have we given them in return? A piece of paper! We managed to hamper their
steps in every direction. We have established sophisticated machinery to
control and limit to the minimum contacts with the Jews.” (Ephraim Dowek,
Israeli-Egyptian Relations 1980-2000. London: Cass, 2001. pp. 120-21).

It became the accepted wisdom that with
the signing of the Peace Agreement with Egypt
there would be no cooperation with Israel other than in matters
concerning security. As such, the Peace with Egypt
was destined to eventually fail because it was predicated on the Arab
assumption that Israel
would itself eventually fall.

The failure of Arab and overall
Muslim imagination is inherent in the hypothesis that Islam is the perfection
of human development and that therefore its enemies must eventually succumb to
its superiority. This innate prejudice
is hardly surprising. A nation in maintaining peace with an adversary does so
for its own benefit not because of some spurious altruistic intent. The Islamic neighbourhood is neither ready
nor able to provide either guarantees or a willingness to pursue peaceful
intentions with Israel
or for that matter, with any one else, unless that is, the alternative is a
collapse of its own enterprise. As I
have referred to in other blogs (see “Mira Awad boycotted by Arabs” 6th
June 2012), the third stage in this war against Israel is “the international
campaign to delegitimize the state as it seeks the dehumanisation of the Jewish
citizens of that state”. This propaganda war is a logical consequence of assuming
‘the fall’.

Some
years after the signing of the peace treaty with Israel, Egyptian Arab farmers sued
the State of Israel before the Egyptian Supreme Court to regain the property
they claim Saladin gave their forefathers 900 years ago. That property is the Wailing Wall, the Jewish
peoples’ holiest religious site. Those
farmers won their case.

Egyptians
generally do not make any distinction between Jewish people and Israelis.
Israelis are seen as the enemy, so likewise are Jews. Thus wrote Michael Slackman
in an article for the New York Times on September 7, 2009. The problem is that
peaceful co-existence between neighbours is dependent not just on the foreign
policy pursued by neighbours but on the attitudes and behaviours of its society.
Egypt
is misogynistic (as emphasised in the May/June 2012 Foreign Policy Magazine
“The Sex Issue”), ethnically racist against its non-Arab inhabitants and
religiously bigoted; a problem given that Islam is the invader and its 10
million Coptic Christians, the persecuted native minority.

The greatest impediment to peace and not just with Egypt but with
the entire Muslim world is our reluctance to fight as Jews for our rights in
our homeland against a Muslim hegemonic and racist theology that precludes
minority rights. Israel’s enemies are legion. Until they also fear
as Israel
fears, they will be unstoppable. Only with acceptance by the Islamic world (and
not just the Islamic world) of the equality of all peoples: Kurds, Assyrians
(Chaldeans), Turkmen and Copts, Christians, Jews, polytheists and pagans, will
peace be possible in the Near-East.

Former
Army Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, said that Egypt facilitated arms smuggling into the Gaza
Strip allowing the Palestinians to continue smuggling arms from Sinai into Gaza despite Israeli
protests. It is no longer wise to pretend
that Egypt will honour its
commitment to sealing its international border with Israel. And honouring ones neighbours sovereignty is
a basic requirement for peaceful co-existence.

Israel’s Western border (Southern Command) will
have to be renewed. This is going to cost billions of dollars in hardware and
new bases as well as a significant increase in the size of the standing
army. The State of Israel can no longer
afford the coalition wrangling over mass deferments and exemptions from
conscription that have plagued the national debate over the last few decades.

Israel is located in a region where the
inalienable right to secure borders and to living ones life with an absence of
fear is deemed conditional and transitory.
In March 2012, 33 years after the signing of the second framework
agreement, ending a state of war that had existed between Israel and Egypt
for almost as long (31 years), Egypt’s
parliament issued a report that referred to Israel as “The Zionist Entity.” So
let me make a controversial statement. The trappings of democracy do not guarantee
peace.

Security
is an attitude to human rights which has little to do with democracy. Those people in the West that support the Palestinians
(Arabs) usually insist on their
‘inalienable rights’ but omit the three inextricably linked concepts that must attach
to those rights in order for all people to live in peace and harmony. Those words are ‘mutuality,’ ‘respect’ and
‘truth’. We all have an inalienable
right to live life without fear of persecution, violence, discrimination or
dehumanisation.

The
June 17, 2012 decision to rewrite the constitution effectively makes the
President of Egypt a disempowered figurehead. A military coup – with the stroke
of a pen has for now, shunted aside the Muslim Brotherhood and slowed its
political ascendancy. Extremism can only
increase with the inevitable slide towards economic failure. Israel will remain as always, a
whipping boy to be used as the means of focusing and diverting popular
discontent. Unless that is, it is no
longer advantageous for Israel to be that whipping boy and for that to happen,
incitement must be rendered unpalatable to all who think it acceptable.